1. The failure of the Carter administration's foreign policy is now clear to everyone except its architects, and even they must entertain private doubts, from time to time, about a policy whose crowning achievement has been to lay the groundwork for a transfer of the Panama Canal from the United States to a swaggering Latin dictator of Castroite bent .a dramatic Soviet military buildup, matched by the stagnation of American armed forces, and a dramatic extension of Soviet influence in the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan, Southern Africa, and the Caribbean, matched by a declining American position in all these areas. The U.S. has never tried so hard and failed so utterly to make and keep friends in the Third World.

2. United States has suffered two other major blows--in Iran and Nicaragua--of large and strategic significance. In each country, the Carter administration not only failed to prevent the undesired outcome, it actively collaborated in the replacement of moderate autocrats friendly to American interests with less friendly autocrats of extremist persuasion.

3. Yet no problem of American foreign policy is more urgent than that of formulating a morally and strategically acceptable, and politically realistic, program for dealing with non-democratic governments who are threatened by ...subversion.

4. Both these small nations were led by men who had not been selected by free elections, who recognized no duty to submit them selves to searching tests of popular acceptability. Both did tolerate limited apposition, including opposition newspapers and political parties, but both were also confronted by radical, violent opponents bent on social and political revolution. Both rulers, therefore, sometimes invoked martial law to arrest, imprison, exile, and occasionally, it was alleged, torture their opponents. Both relied for public order on police forces whose personnel were said to be too harsh, too arbitrary, and too powerful. Each had what the American press termed "private armies," which is to say, armies pledging their allegiance to the ruler rather than the "constitution" or the "nation" or some other impersonal entity.

5.... positively friendly to the U.S., sending their sons and others to be educated in our universities, voting with us in the United Nations, and regularly supporting American interests and positions even when these entailed personal and political cost.

6. U.S. support continued until the regime became the object of a major attack by forces explicitly hostile to the United States.

But once an attack was launched by opponents bent on destruction, everything changed. The rise of serious, violent opposition in Iran and Nicaragua set in motion a succession of events which bore a suggestive resemblance to one another and a suggestive similarity to our behavior in China before the fall of Chiang Kaishek, in Cuba before the triumph of Castro, in certain crucial periods of the Vietnamese war, and, more recently, in Angola. In each of these countries, the American effort to impose liberalization and democratization on a government confronted with violent internal opposition not only failed, but actually assisted the coming to power of new regimes in which ordinary people enjoy fewer freedoms and less personal security than under the previous autocracy--regimes, moreover, hostile to American interests and policies. Dictatorships & Double Standards

Carter lost Iran, Obama lost Egypt. That's the root chord of the song.
In your 2nd line you wrote 'see how easily the name Obama can replace Carter'.
And under point 2 you wrote about 'moderate autocrats friendly to America'.

So I wrote as a response, that you can every time invite those 'moderate autocrats' to govern the USA.
Why are you forcing something on people you wouldn't accept for yourself?

Carter lost Iran, Obama lost Egypt. That's the root chord of the song.
In your 2nd line you wrote 'see how easily the name Obama can replace Carter'.
And under point 2 you wrote about 'moderate autocrats friendly to America'.

So I wrote as a response, that you can every time invite those 'moderate autocrats' to govern the USA.
Why are you forcing something on people you wouldn't accept for yourself?

Click to expand...

Can we include:
FDR lost Eastern Europe
Truman lost China

Now, the reason why I state that your response is insipid, is that you attempt to paint Obama and Mubarak as interchangeable..implying that the people of the United States, with our history and experience, are interchangeable with the people of Egypt, with their history and experience.

Is that the argument you would like to make?
I didn't think so.

Now, to head off further misunderstandings, would you claim that the term 'democracy' as we understand it in the US is the same as the term 'democracy' as understood in Indonesia, Malaysia, Egypt?

I understand that full and complete answers require more time and effort than a thread may earn, but my point re: Carter and Obama stands.

(...)
Now, to head off further misunderstandings, would you claim that the term 'democracy' as we understand it in the US is the same as the term 'democracy' as understood in Indonesia, Malaysia, Egypt?

I understand that full and complete answers require more time and effort than a thread may earn, but my point re: Carter and Obama stands.

Click to expand...

Especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the USA had the power to enforce that the US's definition of democracy is being implemented in countries like Egypt, which were ruled by so-called 'moderate autocrats friendly to the USA'.

Together with Bush's 'Global War on Terror' came a no-look policy and by introducing the term 'Axis of Evil', all those 'friendly autocrats' were put into the 'moderate camp' of Arab nations overnight.
There is nothing moderate about places like Egypt or S.Arabia.

There were a lot of opportunities, were USA could have furthered a democratic and human-rights agenda in those countries. Those opportunities won't come again, and the damage has been done. I know this from my own country, it was always the Europeans who upheld human-rights issues within the relations, Lockheed continued to sell weapons whilst Krauss-Maffei (Leopard) hadn't the permission from German government because of human-rights issues at that times in Turkey.

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